Quotations of Wisdom

There is no tragedy so horrible as that of a beautiful myth being murdered by an ugly fact.

Nothing is more surprising than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few.

If you do the right thing for the right reasons and you keep a cool head while doing it ... it will all work out. -- Interview on NPR Talk of the Nation.

Truly, it is in darkness that one finds the light, so when we are in sorrow, then this light is nearest of all to us.

The decisions I made designing wiki were very much inspired by my desire to create a model for the collaborative process I thought should happen in large code bases. I wanted wiki to mimic that.

Men should pledge themselves to nothing; for reflection makes a liar of their resolution.

Certainty needs not faith, doubt has faith of mistakes.

I don't have to write about the future. For most people, the present is enough like the future to be pretty scary.

(MD) Why can't I play like you? (DG) Because you don't hear it that way.

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

Freedom is not procured by a full enjoyment of what is desired, but by controlling the desire.

The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in the United States is closely connected with this.

It's never too late for the truth.

Every religion is good that teaches man to be good; and I know of none that instructs him to be bad.

Pleasant it is, when over a great sea the winds trouble the waters, to gaze from shore upon another's great tribulation; not because any man's troubles are a delectable joy, but because to perceive you are free of them yourself is pleasant.

When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.

The fact is our passion and points of view are different, not necessarily wrong.

It vexes me when they would constrain science by the authority of the Scriptures, and yet do not consider themselves bound to answer reason and experiment.

Stardate Log: 65228.8 - The Socratic method gathers few votes of approval. Motivation must be acquired beyond popular response.

The Do Good Gauge will provide an opportunity for the populace to develop their own points of view, thus producing a wider perspective of the truth.

An expert is a person who avoids the small errors while sweeping on to the grand fallacy.

I feel that the majority of people should decide for themselves what kind of government they want.

You don't have to like a man to drink his liquor.

To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it.

It is unwise to be too sure of one's own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.

The engineer, and more generally the designer, is concerned with how things ought to be - how they ought to be in order to attain goals, and to function.

It is fortunate that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous.

Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of laborers, the genius of it scientists, and the hopes of its children.

I just invent, then wait until man comes around to needing what I've invented.

Difference of opinion leads to enquiry, and enquiry to truth.

My dear fellow citizens, For forty years you heard from my predecessors on this day different variations on the same theme: how our country was flourishing, how many million tons of steel we produced, how happy we all were, how we trusted our government, and what bright perspectives were unfolding in front of us. I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you.

Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning.

All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.

If man made himself the first object of study, he would see how incapable he is of going further. How can a part know the whole?

However mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard names. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do want society.

The exercise of power is determined by thousands of interactions between the world of the powerful and that of the powerless, all the more so because these worlds are never divided by a sharp line: everyone has a small part of himself in both.

You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.

People should think things out fresh and not just accept conventional terms and the conventional way of doing things.

If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.

Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.

If thou wilt make a man happy, add not unto his riches but take away from his desires.

We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents.

Ignorance is the act of ignoring the collateral damage of one's belief and an apathetic attempt to seek the truth.

Sometimes attaining the deepest familiarity with a question is our best substitute for actually having the answer.

We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another - until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices.

Many scientists will have to contribute to the solution of the great problem; they will have to follow up and measure all those phenomena in which the atomic structure is directly expressed.

I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning.

Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend. To understand the things that are at our door is the best preparation for understanding those that lie beyond.

For globalization to work for America, it must work for working people. We should measure the success of our economy by the breadth of our middle class, and the scope of opportunity offered to the poorest child to climb into that middle class.

I hope that posterity will judge me kindly, not only as to the things which I have explained, but also to those which I have intentionally omitted so as to leave to others the pleasure of discovery.

Search others for their virtue, and yourself for your vices.

I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it.

Where there is charity and wisdom, there is neither fear nor ignorance.

Remember always that a wise man walks with his head bowed; humble like the dust. -- Kung Fu television series 1972

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire.

There's always something suspect about an intellectual on the winning side.

Apply yourself both now and in the next life. Without effort, you cannot be prosperous. Though the land be good, You cannot have an abundant crop without cultivation.

The chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words.

Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.

Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.

Having two bathrooms ruined the capacity to co-operate.

Make a habit of two things: to help; or at least to do no harm.

I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind - and to work some of those contradictions out for myself.

It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.

It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving, it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.

Politics - Even when you win an argument based on half-truths, the people lose.

The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.

Myself acquainted with misfortune, I learn to help the unfortunate.

The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.

It is common sense to take a method and try it; if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man.

There is a measure needing courage to adopt and enforce it, which I believe to be of virtue sufficient to redeem the nation in this its darkest hour: one only; I know of no other to which we may rationally trust for relief from impending dangers without and within.

There is no right to be heard.

Desire is the starting point of all achievement, not a hope, not a wish, but a keen pulsating desire which transcends everything.

I think it is absolutely essential in a democracy to have competition in the media, a lot of competition, and we seem to be moving away from that.

The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.

It is also rarer to find happiness in a man surrounded by the miracles of technology than among people living in the desert of the jungle and who by the standards set by our society would be considered destitute and out of touch.

Most of us will do anything to avoid being wrong. But what if we're wrong about that?

Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved.

We are the spirit the collective conscience. -- From the lyrics of "Heaven's Here on Earth, Album New Beginning"

I think philosophers can do things akin to theoretical scientists, in that, having read about empirical data, they too can think of what hypotheses and theories might account for that data. So there's a continuity between philosophy and science in that way.

The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.

War on the other hand is such a terrible thing, that no man, especially a Christian man, has the right to assume the responsibility of starting it.

Conservatism seeks authority not a moral majority.

We shall never be understood or respected by the English until we carry our individuality to extremes, and by asserting our independence, become of sufficient consequence in their eyes to merit a closer study than they have hitherto accorded us.

The true measure of your worth includes all the benefits others have gained from your success .

You may call God love, you may call God goodness. But the best name for God is compassion.

In a presidential race, who is losing or gaining three points in the latest polls receives much more coverage than where the candidates stand on poverty or foreign policy. It is easy to cover the trivial. A drop in the polls will receive more attention than an in-depth speech on national health care. The average sound bite on network TV news for the Republican presidential primary of 1996 was 7.2 seconds. Almost half the second bites were less than five seconds. Try to say something of substance on any issue in 7.2 seconds! The media should be here not simply to make money, but also to serve, and that service can be improved.

Ninety-nine percent of who you are is invisible and untouchable.

Education makes a people easy to lead but difficult to drive, easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

The best things in life are nearest: Breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of right just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life's plain, common work as it comes, certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things in life.

The evening news is a concept whose time has come and gone.

Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.

If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a state has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his house, what books he may read or what films he may watch.

Can we fathom more than a subatomic point of view?

There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted.

Chase after the truth like all hell and you'll free yourself, even though you never touch its coat tails.